The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
muddy.jprs.me
muddy.jprs.me
make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
Rinse and repeat.
You think 19th century workers had time for 8h of hobbies per day? Let me have what you've been smoking because that's some good stuff.
>when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities
You think 19th century people had no/less responsibilities?
How out of touch do you have to be to see yourself as more oppressed than 19th century workers, when you have abundant food in the supermarkets you don't have to farm, door to door food delivery, online solvable bureaucracy, cars, planes, ambulances and emergency rooms with MRIs, CT scanners and cures for most diseases, OSHA, social security, longest life expectancy ever in the history of mankind, residential heating and cooling at your fingertips, etc. stuff even kings in the 19th century didn't have, a society where you can live a life where you never have to leave your house if you don't want to, yet somehow you think workers had a more leisurely life back then. WHAT?!
> 15 hours work.
Put yourself in the position of an employer trying to start/run a business today. Are your customers gonna pay you extra so you can pay your workers for their private chores and commute?
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
I guess platforms like TikTok might better be thought of as "want to peep in on what a bunch of people do for money now?" which makes it feel (paradoxically, since it is a performance) a bit invasive and unseemly.
The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.
I was trying to do Enigma with a captive portal wifi setup and a (heavily stylized) terminal in a browser. Figured a pi zero w2 might do the job on solar.
The idea was occasional fidonet pickup, some door games, and probably disabled file base. I could seed a few on friends and family porches in the neighborhood, and just see if anyone uses them.
It (enigma) was proving to be a real pain though, and I decided to shelve it for a bit.
The Hackaday one: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/esp32-hosts-solarpunk-messag...
It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.
It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
It sometimes still is, albeit only on niche sites like tumblr, which created Goncharov (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncharov_(meme)
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.
Thanks for checking it out. There's currently over 30K blogs in the feed and we try to diversify it as much as possible. We welcome anyone to contribute more blogs, video channels and comics here:
https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-...
I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.
You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"
I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.
Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
Ironically, it was the Jacquard Loom that made redundant a generation of highly-skilled, mostly female, weavers.
Of course, any human can choose to take up this hobby manually, but we will never again compete in the job market with machines that are accurate, blindingly fast, and so far haven’t demanded the right to vote
https://youtu.be/IvHaL2BxqvM?t=151
We can still do that.
Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage.
But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along!
I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on...
The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
A long time ago there was a french saying "noblesse oblige", or the german pendant "Wohlstand verpflichtet".
It's a done deal, we were too stupid.
I don't know if they are really capable of thinking of the second and third order effects of what they're doing. There is something psychologically broken about many of the ultra-rich today where their behavior comes across as compulsive.
When you have a hole in your soul that can't be filled with a billion dollars, it simply can't be filled, and that black hole drives much of their behavior. You look at people like Trump and Musk, and they seem... miserable. Like, have you ever heard Trump have a genuine laugh of joy? Not the sort of sneering snicker of a bully, but one that comes from delight? Because I haven't.
We are all at the mercy of their actions, but it's almost like they're at the mercy of their irrational compulsions too.
Not that I'm saying they are deserving of sympathy or aren't responsible for their actions. But if we're looking for someone to pump the brakes on the crazy that's happening these days, it's sure as hell not going to be those hollow men.
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
The day I can't block ads is the last day I use youtube.
Truth is everything rots over time, there is no escaping from entropy.
Instead, reads like you're blaming the victim. Shoulda worked harder in school!
Wisdom is accepting that you can only control what you can control, and to focus on that.
I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:
- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.
- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.
- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.
- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.
I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.
I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.
If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.
It is rather upsetting to see. I have a unique perspective in that I’m currently a college student in the US pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering. A lot of my peers have been of a constant plight of not having opportunity in the form of internships, co-ops, whatever it may be and I’m guilty of it myself.
From what I’ve observed, and have been personally fortunate to benefit from, connections seem to be the way amidst ATS, layoffs, shrinking budgets and otherwise. I’ve also seen a fair share of people going to graduate school, possibly out of fear of graduating into a bleak market, but some have done so to become more specialized and I think that’s a good approach, maybe something to discuss with your daughter. Just my two cents.
I think that two significant social conditions that very strongly affect how people socialize online now are
a) there are multiple parallel well-established, invasive, unstoppable, government-sanctioned economies of theft that seek to profit at everyones expense (advertising, AI, surveilance). Why would anyone want to share anything if it's going to be stolen? Why would anyone want to be online if they're going to be spied on? Why would anyone want to look at anything if it's all advertisements?
b) it's politically en vogue for major online platforms to allow (and even propagate) hateful content because of the current political situation in the west. The companies that have grown to control the online spaces that people use are the same companies operating the economies of theft, and have demonstrated that they will happily bend the knee if it means they are allowed to continue stealing and spying and selling all this data to governments. Why would anyone want to use a platform filled with hate speech and political propaganda?
I would describe this combination of conditions as repulsive. There's no more appeal in the social internet because the bad guys won.
My theory is this:
People are just more aware of wealth disparity now. People in the 90s and 00s knew that multi-millionaires and billionaires existed, but they were faraway mystical gargoyles in Connecticut or Monaco.
What's more transparent now is that you might be making $50k and your neighbor might be making $500k. Or the kid you grew up with moved to Dubai after making a small fortune on crypto or drop-shipping, or became a YouTube/TikTok celebrity.
People didn't even know surgeons hit 7 figures, not low 6 figures, until recently. People knew Wall St suits made good money but they assumed it was $200k, not $2m or even $20m.
I remember when levels.fyi first came out and lots of people on social media were like "these numbers are completely made-up". A lot of SWEs themselves didn't even believe FAANG IC SWEs made $200-500k.
Not to mention, social media video lets you experience their lives through their literal point-of-view now.
In a way, the democratization of wealth and fame, and the transparency of information around it, has made people more anxious. We basically live in an era of epidemic FOMO.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
What changed is how the mainstream internet looks like. I could find spaces where there were every kind of people (like my home country’s subreddit) due to their size, and money didn’t drive anything. Now these are even actively manipulated. I haven’t found a single new space in a decade which is generic (different kinds of people from every segments of the populace), it’s content not driven by money, and its topic is not focused, but generic. In other words mainstream spaces without the influence of money.
Nowadays, I can find such spaces only which are very limited in size or reach. And this means that it’s way more difficult to find them.
Also, there was an obvious exodus of smart people from public spaces. Who I followed on Twitter a decade ago, almost nobody left on the public internet. And no, most of them left before Musk. Or they went anonymous, but from my viewpoint it’s the same: there is no way to know what they think, what they know.
..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.
- The past is another country.
The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.
Whether it's an old industry town going to shit or a hippies and artists type place or a former the shit it goes to seems to be the same every damn time.
(alt-right, anti-LGBTQ slur, Internet slang, 4chan slang, derogatory) The supposed promotion of homosexuality, neoliberal economics, and progressive values coupled with the paternalistic curtailment of freedoms by corporate and political interests. [from 2016] [1]
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.
Burning Man may have peaked by now. But looking back, most would agree it still had a lot of good years left in it in 1998.
What if [thing] is just contiguously getting worse? What if that statement has always been true regardless of when it's been said?
I have an auto-redirect userscript set up in Firefox so I never see reddit.com.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).
I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.
A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.
the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
just don't participate in it and do your own thing.
Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.
Write for yourself, not for "engagement".
Do your thing.
The whole appeal of the internet was that you could write about some random niche thing you liked and reliably find other people who liked the same thing. It was never about screaming into a void or otherwise "doing things for yourself". It sucks now specifically because whatever you "do for yourself" is now far less likely to be seen by anyone else who cares than it has ever been before.
I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.
There is a lot of fun stuff still there, but a corporate search engine might not point you to it.
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.
Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.
There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
Maybe a better comparison might be Source engine custom games to Minecraft mods?
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
Blast on mIRC isn't comparable to TikTok. It's direct comparison would be a discord or tg chat.
There are a lot of discord chats full with teens that spend their time talking about modifying software. It mostly a whimsical software like small games or desktop pets, not something of interest to most adults.
I, uh, might be biased, but I think not a lot of teens were at the mIRC chats at the time. Mostly teens bought magazines, watched TV and rented porn.
It seems to me like you are comparing outliers then to a baseline now. Baseline now is pretty good, drug addiction down, teen preggy down, less crime, etc
Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?
I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
Wasted potential is a mournful thing.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.
Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.
Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.
I tried a foldable phone thinking it would solve my issues with mobile interactivity, and learned that it's not the small screen that hinders me. It's the terrible mobile input methods in general, particularly surrounding text manipulation and entry. I didn't keep the phone since it didn't solve my seemingly unsolvable problem after all.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
Let's be honest here, how many of these "specialized ultra-nerdy communities" are closed off Discord servers?
The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.
This has nothing to do with what the internet used to be like.
Nothing new under the sun.
I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.
The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.
I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.
All the little niches can be your personal Web.
There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.
Craigslist is alive and well.
PayPay is weird but who cares.
The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.
That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.
I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages
I think overall, the pull and fun of the internet was in the content delivered; now the attractive forces are overwhelmingly rooted in the delivery.
Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)
This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.
You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.
Been doing this for 20 years.
I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.
All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.
I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.
Yes it was more whimsical, yes I miss it, but no point talking about it anymore, that part of life is over.
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
It sucks the fun out of pretty much anything.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.
If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.
- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.
Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.
Step 3: Read more books.
Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.
Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.
PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:
There are really only a few sites that I would miss (and I have worked to move the content that interests me locally).
It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.
Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.
Ignore Facebook
Ignore X
Ignore all of these places that teach us to be the all-singing all-dancing shit of the world.
Guys, we got old.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
In the 90s, I had:
Instant Messenger with people I knew
IRC channels for interests
Forums for specific topics
A Web Ring for my James Bond website
In the 2000s, we had:
Social Media (Facebook), where you actually talked to people you knew and shared experiences with them
All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.
Maybe that's why something is missing.
Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.
On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.
Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.
We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.
Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.
The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.
Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.
But seriously, I feel like every few years we're all wringing our hands about what's happening to the web. And plenty of folks think they have the correct remedy. Remember when web3 was going to swoop in and save us all? lol
Truth is: the "Keep the Internet Weird" phenomenon never left us, it just went a bit underground. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, perhaps not. Many of my friends in the Fediverse specifically don't want it to grow much, or grow very slowly at most, and I don't entirely agree but…I get it. Would your local comedy club down in the basement be better if it seated 20,000 people? Hell no!
The small web, the slow web, the indie web…these are all movements which are alive and well. Join us!
I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.
Yes the internet has changed, as it always has. The internet is many layers built upon each other. Under no circumstances would I consider the 2000s to be the "old internet", there are probably plenty of people in this thread who get a chuckle out of that. I assure you, there are plenty who look down on what you think was the "golden age". The procession of generations is to lament the younger and affirm Hesiod's ages of man in their own way. I'm sure you don't have to dig very hard to find computer scientists lamenting the new generation of undergrads in the 1980s who spent too much time with the low-brow, crude and totally soulless Usenet phenomenon.
The "old internet" isn't dead, and this is somewhat acknowledged by the author with a disclaimer. In fact, they make note the number of people producing work that they would normally value is higher than ever. But they lament it with a vague feeling that it's simply "not the same", not feeling like it "came from some place". That's very telling, because that's exactly a sensation of disenchantment. As we age, there are less surprises, less things feel new, less mysteries to wonder about. Patterns that were hidden and novel come into stark relief. The more pessimistically minded begin to suffer from world-weariness. Anomie sets in, and rationalization begins, attempting to ground the loss of youthful whimsy with some external phenomenon.
I would say embrace it, you were always on your way to become a crotchety old coot. That's a very important social role to play. Just don't mistake your rationalization of feelings for something substantial, it's nothing but a hard-wired delusion to help guide your development as a human being.
Cory Doctorow's Enshittification for example.
For good reason.
Me, I understand this through the analogy of how drug markets go.
1. Addict people to the product.
2. Profitmaxx by reducing quality at the addicts' expense.
That's it, that's the whole story.
People aren't nihilist - social media is.
People aren't shallow - dating apps are.
The world isn't shit - late capital is.
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
The old internet still exists, you just have to look for it. There are still personal blogs and forums and webrings.
It's just that you can't find those things on reddit and Facebook.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.